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Patient medication, health management platform CareZone raises $50M

This morning CareZone, a platform for managing chronic illness and organizing health information, announced that it landed $50 million in a series D funding round led by NEA, with participation from McKesson Ventures, and Marc Benioff. This brings the company’s total funding to $150 million.

Founded in 2012, the platform aims to help users keep track of their medications and make managing chronic conditions simpler.

“Our average user on CareZone is on six medications [and] has had a chronic issue to manage, whether it is a child who needs to be on transplant meds or an individual who is facing a cancer diagnosis or taking care of an elder,” Jonathan Schwartz, cofounder and CEO of CareZone, told MobiHealthnews. “The audience we serve are people who are having a hard time managing complicated health issues.”

In order to document medications using the technology, patients open up their medicine cabinet and point their smartphone camera at each medication. The platform can then scrape the data off of those medication labels and automatically populate the information on the app.

“That app now has become your system of record for your medication list. Often if you find yourself in a healthcare setting a doctor will ask what medications are you on,” Schwartz said. “We give people the ability to answer that by just taking out their phone and saying that is my list.”

Based on the medications that the patient or caregiver has scanned, the platform will give the user prompts when it is time to take or refill their medication. It can also give users information about the best insurance plans for them based on their medication list. Users can also get medication delivered for free via the app.

Schwartz said that managing chronic conditions and helping loved ones manage their care is personal for the founders at CareZone.

“All of us were grappling with these issues in our own families so we decided back in 2012 to use technology to address the problem we hadn’t seen many people addressing,” he said. “It is easy to buy things online or reserve a scooter or watch a movie, it is a lot more complicated to take care of yourself or a loved one.”

Schwartz said the new funding will help the company expand its services, noting that there is an increasing focus on consumer-facing tools with multiple functions in one place.

“It is clear if you look at the industry that health insurers, retail, and a lot of diagnostics are converging. Big companies are merging like Express-Scripts [and] CVS-Aetna, and you see Amazon waiting in the wings,” Schwartz said. “What we believe they are all heading towards is the integration of pharmacy, insurance, and healthcare all in a single platform, and that is what CareZone provides."

With these industry trends in mind, Schwartz is optimistic about the trajectory of his growing company.

"So the funding is to continue our growth. At this point we generate a million dollars in pharmacy orders every week or so, so we are growing very quickly. And the scale of the market is really unlimited," he said. "We connect to existing providers and we work with an independent network of pharmacy and payers … we help provide that seamless e-commerce experience on the front end and are able to connect it to all to the complex and complicated back end. In a simplistic way we make healthcare the same delightful e-commerce experience in every other aspect of your life, but we do it for the one area that has been under attended.”